#BrlChat: Free Professional Development from the Comfort of Your Home!
By Natalie Shaheen
nlshaheen@gmail.com
Do you look forward to conferences, conventions, and other professional gatherings for
the energy, camaraderie, and intellectually stimulating conversations that occur when a group of
passionate professionals comes together? Do
you leave these gatherings wishing you had more
opportunities to converse with your colleagues in
the field of blindness from across the country and
the world? By leveraging the power of the technology that is ever-present in our lives, we can
increase our access to these important learning
opportunities throughout the year.
Over the last several years, educators and
other professionals have begun to utilize social
networks and other Web services to create community-driven, dynamic, and free professional development opportunities for themselves. One
popular vehicle for facilitating these professional
learning opportunities is a Twitter chat. In the field
of education, there are Twitter chats for special
educators, kindergarten teachers, social studies
teachers, first-year teachers, principals — the list
goes on.
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A Twitter chat is an online conversation organized by a community around a topic important
to its members. As you may have deduced, these
chats take place on Twitter, the social networking
site. The conversations generally last an hour.
The frequency with which these conversations
occur depends on the needs and desires of the
community.
